What Microsoft gets wrong about the tablet-laptop redundancy

While onstage at the Surface Pro 3 event, Microsoft vice president and Surface creator Panos Panay cited a pretty surprising statistic: 96 percent of iPad owners also own a laptop. Tablet and laptop ownership relationships are studied constantly, but I'd never before heard it phrased in such a way that made me feel so dumb for owning both. That was all I needed to hear at the time to buy the argument that tablets should be more like laptops in the quest to unify them, at least for the duration of the presentation.

Further Reading

From Microsoft's perspective, a tablet and a computer can and should be the same device. "We’re still carrying around a tablet and a separate laptop, and our take is that Surface Pro 3 is a tablet that can replace your laptop," Jordan Guthmann, a PR representative for Microsoft, told Ars. This felt new as Panay said it, but to look back a couple of years, it's not a new narrative for Microsoft to push: Windows 8 has been the near-sole driving force behind tablet/laptop hybrids, and many hardware manufacturers have come at the hybrid form factor from every conceivable angle. They have yet to take off.

While the 96-percent statistic seems to support Microsoft's narrative that tablets and laptops are a redundancy that hardware manufacturers have a duty to fix, overwhelming evidence suggests that is not true. Few people try to or want to use tablets like laptops, save for when they feel like they have to justify the cost and get every last inch of mileage out of it. Tablet popularity arose in a place where people were using laptops like tablets, or smartphones like tablets, but in suboptimal ways that showed a tablet was better.

Why the tablet is popular

Ever since the iPad landed in the market as a clear luxury item without a specifically defined use case, market researchers have been tracking it, alongside other tablets, to figure out what we actually use them for and where. In short, we use tablets almost everywhere we don't use laptops, or where we would use laptops in an absolute pinch but would prefer not to: bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Tablets have filled in a particular kind of pared-down computer experience everywhere the laptop wasn't, or everywhere that it might have been incidentally but not quite suited to the job—sitting open and waiting to be spilled on, or nestled in some blankets on a couch or in a bed, the less-than-capacious battery trickling away.

The 96-percent figure, which Microsoft says is "proprietary research," seems a bit high compared to similar available figures. A study from last fall found that 58.5 percent of people buying tablets did so to use in addition to their laptop, not to try to replace it. That leaves another 42 percent who either don't use a laptop as a computer, have never owned a computer, or who were trying to replace a laptop with a tablet. But if we reconcile Microsoft's 96-percent figure with the 58.5 percent one, we see that the grand majority of people intend their tablet and laptop for distinct purposes, to be used in tandem.

Microsoft's assumption is that the difference of purpose is for lack of a laptop that can act enough like a tablet. But this denies the tablet the niche that it made itself from whole cloth. The tablet interest explosion was born out of the launch of the iPad, a device that was met with serious and unflinching derision and cost a good deal more upfront than a smartphone, when smartphones can largely fill the same role of casual e-mail reading, browsing, and gaming, and are bested by tablets only in screen size.

Now smartphones are regularly horning in on the tablet space too, with the increasingly common, 5-inch-plus-screened monsters from Samsung and HTC. Gadgets big and small want in on that idle time that tablets so seamlessly hijacked over the last few years.

Can two become one?

Microsoft is not necessarily wrong that maybe now tablets and laptops are similar enough, hardware-wise, that we can move around from home to office with one device plastered to our sides. But Microsoft's other selling points for the Surface, like its cloud integration, are also a vote in favor of multiple devices. It doesn't matter if you keep a separate tablet on your couch and leave your laptop at home; everything data-related is everywhere anyway.

The last consideration is price. As we mentioned, tablets have long been a luxury item, even if they have a pretty well-defined, casual-use niche by now. Surely it would make more sense for a customer to buy a device that can fulfill both tablet and laptop functions, if possible.

But the Surface can't quite cover that base, either. The device starts at $799 for a modest Core i3 model, and goes up to $1,949 for the highest-end Core i7. That's not including the Type Cover keyboard (an extra $130). Tablets are cheap enough now that it is possible to cover both device the tablet and laptop bases for under $1,000. Tablets as a category are still growing, but the growth has slowed. PCs are also still growing worldwide, but at a much slower rate.

Microsoft's latest Surface pitch has a chance to succeed with people who are either frustrated with having to choose between a laptop and a tablet, or who have both but see them as impractical. But despite the seemingly damning 96-percent statistic, that is not most people who are interested in tablets anyway. Many people purposefully have both devices because a tablet fills a distinct need, and because of the cloud, the only difference between having two devices and one is that you have to carry one around. So, like with all of the convertible laptop-tablets that have come before, we won't be surprised if this pitch's initial effect doesn't play out to a grand success.